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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28249011">Unto Us, A Child</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange'>beethechange</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Ancient Magical Wishing Well Verse [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>A Small Piece of Light Heresy, Accidental Baby Acquired, Also Blasphemy But It's All in Good Fun, Christmas Fluff, Kid Fic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:40:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,587</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28249011</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing about doing a soft launch of your secret baby right before Christmas, which Shane foolishly did not foresee, is that comparisons will inevitably arise to <i>other</i> babies with mysterious origin stories. </p><p>Like, uh, Jesus.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Ancient Magical Wishing Well Verse [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946041</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>249</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Skeptic Believer Book Club Advent Calendar</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Unto Us, A Child</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this story's for the bridge club advent day 22, and if even one of you whispers a single word about how i have exceeded my own word count rule i will throw this chair!!</p><p>anyway this probably won't make sense if you haven't read the first two fics in this series, but i badly wanted to stop in and see how this lil family was faring on their first christmas. just a taste for now, but i plan to return to this 'verse in the new year.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>*</p><p>The thing about doing a soft launch of your secret baby right before Christmas, which Shane foolishly did not foresee, is that comparisons will inevitably arise to other babies with mysterious origin stories.</p><p>Like, uh, Jesus.</p><p>It’s a soft launch because they’re nowhere near ready to debut Matilda to the world, to take their little family <em>public</em>-public with all the drama and speculation that would entail. But it’s Christmas, and they’ve got this perfect little creature, and Ryan cannot be talked out of showing her off to a limited circle of friends and colleagues for even one more day.</p><p>And the jokes <em>pour</em> in.</p><p>The tongue-in-cheek questions about immaculate conception have Ryan a little rattled, but Shane isn’t bothered. It’s not like people have any idea their jokes hold a smidgen of truth; all they know is that a baby has suddenly appeared to two people who by all rights should not have a baby, and it’s Christmastime, and that's funny. But that’s where the similarities begin and end.</p><p>Shane’s not religious, but he is reasonably certain the baby Jesus was born on a pile of dirty hay while half of Old MacDonald’s farm and several visiting dignitaries looked on. Baby Tilly, in stark opposition to this, was removed from Ryan’s ill-begotten uterus by a team of world-class surgeons with a grudge against the American health insurance system.</p><p>Whereas the baby Jesus had—famously, Shane recalls!—no crib for His bed, Tilly sleeps in a $1500 Snoo that Linda Bergara ordered online when she realized her first grandchild was sleeping in a particle board affair from Target.</p><p>As soon as the viscera was wiped off His brow, Jesus was allegedly wrapped in swaddling clothes. Shane googles this, and in Biblical times that would’ve meant a bunch of white bandages like a mummy. Tilly has an entire dresser full of tiny boots and tiny hats with tiny pom-poms on top and the smallest mittens that Shane has ever seen, and he’s pretty sure Ryan is now a majority shareholder in babyGap.</p><p>(<em>The baby doesn’t need tiny Uggs, Ryan, she lives in Southern California and also she can’t walk. </em>Shane has some version of this argument ten times in the month of November, and he loses every single one. He’s beginning to think he will not win another argument ever again, because Ryan <em>grew</em> the baby and so holds every ace in his hand.)</p><p>So, yeah, Shane doesn’t mind the jokes about immaculate conception or virgin birth. It’s just that in his opinion Tilly is better <em>by far</em> than Jesus, and demeaned by the comparison. </p><p>*</p><p>People traveled from near and far to attend to the Christ Child in his manger—shepherds and wise men, angels and donkeys. Confused innkeepers. The cast of characters seems to grow every time Shane hears a telling, a pilgrimage like a conga line. Ryan could tell him aliens attended the birth of the Messiah and at this point he’d probably believe it.</p><p>But this year Ryan wants to spend Christmas day alone, just the three of them. He’s weirdly firm about it. Shane thinks he must have been imagining this for a very long time, deciding how he wants it to be: his first Christmas with a family of his own making, in the home he built for them, metaphorically if not literally, starting traditions that will shape the next many Decembers of their lives.</p><p>Santa brings clothes and toys for Tilly, even though—as Shane points out and Ryan ignores—she’s scarcely had time on this earth yet to be either naughty <em>or</em> nice. Mostly she just sleeps and poops and gurgles happily at them, but then perhaps that’s enough to have earned an entire pile of board books and stuffies and a pair of vibrantly rainbow Jordan 1 crib booties. Shane doesn’t know what metrics Santa uses to make those crucial determinations.</p><p>Christmas day passes quietly, the three of them huddled up in the living room, watching movies and eating tamales Ryan’s parents brought over the day before. They sit on the floor and lie Tilly on her blanket at the base of the tree, where she can look up at the lights. She’s wearing a hooded onesie that makes her look like a chubby little reindeer, complete with felt antlers. When she kicks her feet joyfully it moves her whole body, so the antlers flop to and fro.</p><p>At nearly two months her vision’s finally started to sharpen; she looks up at the bright colors with solemn reverence and singular focus, until she starts to blink herself to sleep.</p><p>They watch It’s a Wonderful Life, and Shane looks at his husband and his daughter and thinks how lucky he is, that his own weird, wonderful life chose him.</p><p>“Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building and Loan!” he says, giving it his very best old-timey Jimmy Stewart impression, because he’s not sure he can find the words to tell Ryan that he feels like something reached down for <em>him</em> this year to show him the beauty and magic of his own life.</p><p>“What is it you want, Mary?” Ryan gives it right back with a wink, not as practiced as Shane’s impression but still recognizably Stewart. “What do you want? You want the moon?”</p><p>Shane knows Ryan doesn’t need him to make a big speech about what this day means to him. They both know they’ve already got the moon.</p><p>*</p><p>They watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Shane listens to Linus lecture Charlie Brown about the true meaning of Christmas like a sanctimonious little twerp and thinks again about that first Christmas morning. Even if they weren’t chosen by God, even if they were just two scared teenagers huddled in some guy’s barn, they woke up one day to find their family one bigger and their lives changed forever. Shane can empathize. </p><p>“You’ve got to hand it to her,” Shane says.</p><p>“Who? Tilly?”</p><p>“Mary. The whole, you know, virgin birth thing—pretty good. Creative. And it’s not like anybody else could ever use that excuse to explain away a surprise baby ever again.”</p><p>“You don’t think maybe she was telling the truth?”</p><p>Shane snorts. “No, Ryan, I don’t think. I think she had sex with some Galilean hunk before marriage and had to save her own skin. And I’m saying I respect it.”</p><p>“Some <em>hunk</em>?” Ryan frowns. He’s on his belly on the ground, half on Tilly’s blanket, counting her toes through the feet of her onesie as she sleeps. “I don’t know, man. After the year we’ve had, I’m not about to go casting aspersions on other people’s miracles.”</p><p>“Maybe she threw a shoelace into a wishing well. Did they have shoelaces back then?” Shane pulls out his phone to google <em>did Jesus have shoelaces</em>.</p><p>“Or maybe <em>our</em> wishing well was actually God in disguise, and I just carried the second coming of our lord and savior to term while co-running a successful digital media company,” Ryan shoots back. “And what thanks did I get?”</p><p>Shane hums, tossing his phone aside. He leans back against the couch and stretches his legs out.</p><p>“If I was a deity looking for the Earthly parents of the next physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit, I think I’d try to do better than two idiots who hunt ghosts and grow ugly mustaches for a living,” he says. “And, no offense, but if He was looking for a virgin to knock up he really missed the mark.”</p><p>Ryan reaches over to slap Shane on the shin. “Rude.”</p><p>“Hey! I bet Mary never hit <em>her</em> hunk,” Shane says. “Ol’ what’s-his-name. Joseph. Not exactly saintlike behavior.”</p><p>“I never claimed to be a saint.” Ryan grins. “And you have to admit that as conceptions go, it was”—he does one of those awful chef’s kisses—“<em>immaculate</em>.”</p><p>His eyes are wide, the picture of innocence, but his smile spells mischief. Shane’s about to scoot over and see how much mischief they can make when Tilly—with characteristically stellar timing—starts to stir fitfully.</p><p>“Your daughter, Queen of Kings, the Lamb of God, requires a diaper change,” Shane says, sniffing the air. “If the Holy Spirit moves you.”</p><p>*</p><p>And it’s all just jokes—of course it is.</p><p>Except that later that night, after dinner, Ryan picks up an abandoned half-drunk glass of water from the kitchen table and tosses it back to finish it off. And then he starts coughing and choking, his face bright red, and he shoves the glass into Shane’s hand.</p><p>“Smell,” he croaks, and Shane sticks his nose inside. He smells alcohol, and fruity sweetness, and there are a few droplets of red clinging to the inside of the rim.</p><p>“So you poured yourself some wine and forgot about it,” he says.</p><p>It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. They’re both getting way too little sleep and working too much, running on fumes and the thrill of their shared secret, and there are days when Shane barely remembers his own name. They’re not big wine drinkers, but there are bottles of wine in the house, gifted by friends after hearing their good tidings of great joy.</p><p>“No,” Ryan says, his eyes narrowed. He’s licking his lips, like he can still taste tartness there. “I’m pretty sure this was water.”</p><p>Fast asleep in her Moses basket on the living room floor, Tilly snuffles and sighs. They both turn to look at her.</p><p>If she’s recently performed any holiday mischief of her own, either magical or miraculous, she’s not telling.</p><p>*</p>
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